Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[m-reader]

This is one of my favourite ones:

"A fool with a tool is still a fool".

I don't know who the author is ...

[WT Sharpe]

.....I know heaps of quotations, so I can always make quite a fair show of knowledge.
..........— Isak Dinesen [pen name of Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke] (1885-1962), Danish novelist and short story writer. The Setons (1917).

[WT Sharpe]

.....I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.
..........— King James Bible, II Samuel 1:26.

[WT Sharpe]

.....And yet the Fellowship was attracted to a kind of soft fascism. In 1932, Abram took as a Bible student Henry Ford. By then, the automaker was a wizened old leather strop of a man, wary of controversy. He had been the American publisher of the notoriously fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic fantasia concocted in czarist Russia to justify pogroms against Jews, and the author of The International Jew, a book many Nazis would later credit with awakening their Aryan anti-Semitism. During the previous decade, historians suspect, he'd illegally financed Adolf Hitler. But it was not just national socialism's bigotry that Ford supported, nor even mainly that. What Ford, inventor of the assembly line, loved above all was efficiency. Even his war of words against the Jews had been in the interests of standardization, the purging of "others" from the American scene. And yet, in 1932, Ford wanted certain details of his campaign for American purity to disappear. He wanted to sell cars to Jews. He was in need of a makeover, a quick bath in the Blood of the Lamb.
..........— Jeff Sharlet (1972 - ), American journalist and author specializing in writing about religious subcultures. The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of Amercian Power (2008).

.....But he was frustrated by Ford's failure to settle on one simple fundamentalist explanation of life and the universe, until, at their final meeting, Ford finally shouted, "Vereide, I've got it! I've got it! I found the release that you spoke of. I've made my surrender. The only thing that matters is God's will." But Ford continued to see divine will best expressed in German fascism. As Hitler's power grew, Ford became more comfortable expressing his admiration. It was mutual; the Führer hung a portrait of Ford behind his desk and told the industrialist, on a visit Ford paid to Nazi Germany, that national socialism's accomplishments were simply an implementation of Ford's vision.
..........— Ibid.

[astra]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

.....I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.
..........— King James Bible, II Samuel 1:26.

I am not sure I got this one.

[poohbear_nc]

I don't know why, but this tickles me to pieces:

THE LAY OF THE LAST CRICKET

Cleft in the narrow gulf of gusty grief
My soul is like a cricket on a leaf,
Who peering down amongst the autumn grasses
Peevishly wonders where he left his glasses.

From Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker - the character Miss Hargreaves is a "poetess" with one published volume "Wayside Bundle"

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

.....I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.
..........— King James Bible, II Samuel 1:26.

Originally Posted by astra

I am not sure I got this one.

Don't feel bad. Bible scholars have been puzzling over it for years. Just how close were Jon & Dave, and what did David mean in saying Jonathan's "wonderful" love for him was beyond the love of women?

[astra]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Don't feel bad. Bible scholars have been puzzling over it for years. Just how close were Jon & Dave, and what did David mean in saying Jonathan's "wonderful" love for him was beyond the love of women?

I wonder whether what I think is what he meant...

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Don't feel bad. Bible scholars have been puzzling over it for years. Just how close were Jon & Dave, and what did David mean in saying Jonathan's "wonderful" love for him was beyond the love of women?

The love for a brother need not necessarily mean anything untoward !!! But in those days moral stances differed from ours, anyway.

[assuming, somewhat uncharitably on my part, that the phrase has not been altered by jealous monks or scribes sometime during the Middle Ages, especially late at night and in candle-light]

[WT Sharpe]

.....It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
..........— Eugène Ionesco (1912-1994), Rumaian-born French writer. Découvertes (1969). Quoted in The Great Thoughts (1985) by George Seldes.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

The love for a brother need not necessarily mean anything untoward !!! But in those days moral stances differed from ours, anyway.

[assuming, somewhat uncharitably on my part, that the phrase has not been altered by jealous monks or scribes sometime during the Middle Ages, especially late at night and in candle-light]

Certainly brotherly love doesn't of itself imply sexual attraction, but powerful men and powerful libidos have often gone hand in hand in rulers, and powerful libidos are not always discriminating about where they find fulfillment. One only has to consider the well-known bi-sexuality of Alexander the Great, or recall the words of the Elder Curio concerning Julius Caesar:

.....At ne cui dubium omnino sit et impudicitiae et adulteriorum flagrasse infamia, Curio pater quadam eum oratione omnium mulierum virum et omnium virorum mulierem appellat.
.....And to emphasize the bad name Caesar had won alike for unnatural and natural vice, I may here record that the Elder Curio referred to him in a speech as: "Every woman's man and every man's woman."
..........— Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (c. 69 – c. 140), Roman biographer. Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars, translated by Robert Graves (Harmondsworth, 1979).

The Bible doesn't always portray David as a saint; he committed many breeches of the Mosaic Law that would have resulted in the death penalty for one less connected to power, not the least of which were adultery and murder, and evidenced in the unpleasant business concerning Uriah the Hittite and Bathsheba. Whether David and Jonathan were lovers is unclear, but it isn't outside the realm of the possible, and it would go a long way toward explaining the words of King Saul to his son Jonathan in I Samuel 20:30 (KJV):

.....Then Saul's anger was kindled against Jonathan, and he said unto him, Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman*, do not I know that thou hast chosen the son of Jesse to thine own confusion, and unto the confusion of thy mother's nakedness?

"Confusion" was often a term Bible writers used to imply homosexual conduct, and this passage seems to imply that something more than mere friendship was going on between his son and the man who many consider the apple of God's eye. Perhaps the later scribes and monks you mentioned invented David's success with the ladies as a cover for their own embarrassment concerning David's natural inclinations. I don't believe they did that, but it's just as likely as postulating that they altered the text because they were "jealous" of David.

.....▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

* An early edition of Kenneth Taylor's The Living Bible quotes Saul in this passage as referring to Jonathan as a "son of a bitch."

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

.....It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
..........— Eugène Ionesco (1912-1994), Rumaian-born French writer. Découvertes (1969). Quoted in The Great Thoughts (1985) by George Seldes.

:chortle:

So apt in the light of recent postings !

[WT Sharpe]

.....A pretty air in an opera is prettier there than it could be anywhere else, I suppose, just as an honest man in politics shines more than he would elsewhere.
..........— Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835 – 1910), American humorist. A Tramp Abroad (1880).

[BenG]

‘‘On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.’’
‘‘Odd,’’ said Arthur. ‘‘I thought you said it was a democracy.’’
‘‘I did,’’ said Ford.
‘‘You mean they actually vote for the lizards?’’
‘‘Oh, yes,’’ said Ford with a shrug, ‘‘of course.’’
‘‘But,’’ said Arthur, going for the big one again, ‘‘why?’’
‘‘Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,’’ said Ford, ‘‘the wrong lizard might get in.’’

—Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1985)

[poohbear_nc]

"Wherever I went, whatever I did, this was what I would come back to. A blank wall in a meaningless room in a meaningless house.
I put the drink down on a side table without touching it. Alcohol was no cure for this. Nothing was any cure but the hard inner heart that asked for nothing from anyone."

Raymond Chandler "Playback"